Steve: Good afternoon Bruce.
Bruce: Hey, is this Steve?
Steve: Yes it is.
Bruce: Okay, I was looking in my calendar and I forgot to change those I was having you on at 1:15.
Steve: Oh, I see.
Bruce: Perfect, no that is fine because I was telling everybody we’re going to have you on 1:15 and then I don’t think my email from you at 2:15 anyway thanks so much for joining us today.
Steve: It’s a real pleasure to be here I would say in opinion this is probably on the top two or three shows on new screen for business so it's really a pleasure to be on here today.
Bruce: Well thank you so much unfortunately we had to shut down wire cast today our software that we used, we were having a lot of audio problems with it so were going to be working with tech support to get that cured up to the—
Steve: Gotcha.
Bruce: But were running on Google cam twist as our backup and it seems to be doing just fine.
Steve: Well I'm glad to hear that.
Bruce: Steve, to get started can you tell us a little bit about BLAM. That is the name of your company is it BLAM?
Steve: Yeah, well BLAM is the acronym for big local advertising and marketing and I think most of our clients were referring to us like big local this days but say, yeah, BLAM big local it's all the same thing.
What we are is the search marketing company, whose specializes in placing businesses on the first page of Google for every potential search term that’s someone may used to applying their product or service. But we actually go a step further in that so I mean what you typically find in our advertising I would say 90 to 95% of online advertising is a real gear towards, on basically the numbers you know I think the analytics and stat programs out there have done a great job to show us insight into how websites are growing.
But the down side to that is that a lot of people have really turned consumers into numbers or into just statistics and anybody who’s running or breaking motor company knows that that’s you knows the easiest, the fastest way to failure. What—let me give you an analogy using say Wal-Mart. The advertising I see today is very similar to you walking into Wal-Mart finding somebody who has a blue smock on and asked them to where find running shoes.
Bruce: Okay.
Steve: And having that associate answer Wal-Mart official store we carry more for less shop now. Right, so now you're sitting there and wondering well there’s obviously a big communication breakdown here and so you’ve done a little and say “Shoes, I'm looking for shoes”. And at that point the associate looks at you and says “Wal-Mart official store we carry more for less shop now”.
There is clearly, there is clearly no communication going on in that case and also for the few people who do actually agree with the person or click into the ad in our case. What's happening in most cases the person you go on asked for shoes and the person say “Wal-Mart official store blah, blah, blah” and you say “Fine, I would like to shop now lead me to it” and that associate taking you by the hand bringing you to the front of the store and dropping you off at the door.
Right, so the overall costumer experience in that entire situation is just clearly there is a lot missing there. So what we want to do is we want to look at all the potential search terms someone would use to finding her business and communicate directly and relevant, you know in a relevant manner to what their looking for. So somebody is looking for shoe stores and ought to look then what we want to do is have and ad of it says auto is top shoe stores. There is hundreds of shoe store in auto well fighting for your business and we’d rather earn it.
And then if the searches are followed up to clear you with the woman’s dress shoes we would now want our ad to read shops for women dress shoes, freedoms is about choice. We have 397 styles of women dress shoes with free shop now. So that experience is going to bring people into your store in a better environment, in a better manner and likely because of that experience you're going to see a much higher conversion on your site.
Bruce: This brings up a question and because I remember my initial experience with the Google page search.
Steve: Right.
Bruce: In getting it going, by the way it is best before you invest in that and to talk somebody like Steve because if you try to learn on your own you can make some very costly mistakes.
Steve: That’s very true.
Bruce: One of the things that I kind of got impression on when I was researching it and learning my way about it was that you want to make sure—that number one your site has very specific and relative content to what you're doing.
Steve: That’s a very good point.
Bruce: Okay, and more or less that you need to be somewhat found by Google before you start spending money on page search, is that correct?
Steve: I actually say that you want to do opposite.
Bruce: Okay.
Steve: So, if I was to start a website tomorrow what I would want to do is first go into a page search program and while that’s running or subsequently after what you want to do is work on you know you're search engine optimization and building into the organic or natural results. The two according to Google, the two have nothing to do with each other so if you're you know if you're being shown in page search it doesn’t affect your organic search. And there is a lot of controversy, whether that’s true or not but into such conversation turns another day.
Bruce: All right.
Steve: But, yeah, so essentially what you really want to do is you want to start off with page search and the reason for that is because it could take you as I'm sure you know weeks, months or years. To get rank anywhere in the top few pages or let alone first few spots for any giving keyword. With search marketing we can get you right in front of the majority of your costumers starting tomorrow. You know if I choose in right keywords, the ad copy and the right landing pages. That level of control does doesn’t even exist in natural results you really locked up to the search engines to decide what texture show and what pages to put people on with search marketing you have full control over where how and when people shop on your site.
Bruce: That brings back some more things with my dealings with Google because the way it kind of works is you put a campaign together and you select keywords and this keywords you’ve bid on those more or less and you can start with amount of money to bid on the keywords to show up in the page search and the placement of those page search. If you don’t do it right, the cost keeps going up substantially you're bid in order to get those keywords and that was the dilemma I found myself and I started watching the minimum bid go from you know a few cents up into the dollars and I wasn’t doing it something right.
Steve: No.
Bruce: And Google is not very forgiving of that by the way if you make that mistake initially you can wipe out that campaign tool and then start over but it seems to remember the results that you would have gotten for your domain before. And immediately start you at the high bids because of their past experience with you is that correct Steve?
Steve: That’s a very good insight, so the way it works is you're overall account history comes into play when their determining your quality score. Your quality score will do as much as decrease the amount of cost per click by up to 60% or decrease or increase the amount you spend by up to 600% which would be somebody who one out of ten quality score.
The quality scores determined by several factors the most important one is your click through rates so clearly Google wants to see adds that are getting clicked on the majority of the time or at a healthy percentage. And the reason for that is well for their side their going to make more money if they can show, showing out that’s going to get clicked on more which is of course the only way you would pay for, pay for that action as if.
Bruce: Right.
Steve: If somebody clicks on it.
Bruce: Right.
Steve: The quality scores probably the most important thing I can do for my clients. And like you I had said even by me coming on and parading a campaign for somebody there account performance is still going to deteriorate or raise the cost for clicking and I would say three or four out the client, three or four out the ten of the clients I deal with I actually have them open up a new account with the new credit card and new information. What you can do and then that allows us to start, fresh start back concerning when you don’t get penalized with the Google slob as it were.
Bruce: The Google slob.
Steve: That’s right.
Bruce: Because I'm telling my experience with the Google folks the ones at least I talked to they love it, some shared some insights are very, very tight lift about how they do things at Google. They expect you to read the material that they provide and understand that before you give them that credit card number, they're not the business to design campaign. They’ll offer to do that for a substantial fee, but there are still no guarantees on the results.
Steve: That’s true.
Bruce: What got you into this business Steve?
Steve: Actually when I started at the very beginning I had another bar and business running back in 2002 and that’s where I first learned about paid searching, search marketing in general. And it was, it was one of those things where as soon as I got into it I realized how important it is. So with traditional Medias, so buying radio ads, magazine, newspapers and television you really have to guess at who you're market is.
And I mean you spend substantial dollars figuring it out to some degree but at the end of the day, everybody is unique, everybody thinks differently in mixed decisions differently and any given ad that you put in traditional media can only reach at best 50 or 60% of those people the rest just thinks differently, act differently and you're not speaking to them. With search marketing it gives you full control and not only do you get to see and—
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